Thursday, August 28, 2008

I've been writing about the Coen Brothers, Joel and Ethan, today because their latest movie, Burn After Reading, opened the Venice Film Festival last night. These Award-winning screenwriters/directors intrigue me.

Their last film, No Country For Old Men, was, for me, a masterclass in screenwriting of originality and cinematic power. But the brilliant double-act are notoriously wary of wanting to seem serious about their work. The latest, stuffed with glamorous A-celebrities, whooping it up as near-parodies of their screen personas, must have been quite a relief after the majestic solemnity of No Country.

It's ostensibly a spy thriller, but as usual with the Coens, they've exploded the movie genre's rules, and turned the whole escapade into a story that's much more about how human beings get things wrong.

And that's what's interesting about their films. They can take a genre and do whatever they like with it. For all its humour, Burn After Reading has a pretty dark underbelly. A spoof spy thriller made to say something that's meaningful about marital infidelity, the cult of appearance and so on.

The improbable, convoluted plot involves a failed CIA analyst who's a neurotic alcoholic (John Malkovich), a sports trainer airhead who loves inflicting pain on his clients (Brad Pitt), a no-longer-young unmarried woman who's dream in life is to have a surgeon's knife slice off fat from her stomach and buttocks and inject her breasts with chemical polymers (Frances McDormand, wife of Joel Coen), a hypochrondiac who's a serial philanderer with a serious commitment problem (George Clooney), and a stuck-up Englishwoman (Tilda Swinton).

You can see, even from these brief descriptions of the characters, that the film's plot hardly matters. Tell that to the screenwriting gurus with their iron-clad '3-Act-Structure' and pre-set 'Plot Points' and 'Make it Plot-Driven!' commandments.

All the most exciting screenwriters and directors are blowing up the rule books - and winning awards not just in Europe but in Hollywood.

It's an invigorating time for movies because we're seeing how screenwriters are making their own rules -being inventive, original and genuinely ground-breaking. They're certainly inspiring me to keep going with my own voice, and making it drown out those hesitant doubts that so-called experts on creative writing try to crush me with.BurnAfter Reading is fast and funny, but satire doesn't come better than this. Of course, the Coens just say it's a fun ride, but I think that's a little disengenuous of them. They seem to achieve something that I imagine most creative individuals would like to achieve. Sending the audience away with their minds stretched, and feeling a little less secure in their comfort-zone.